A walk at Windsor Nature Park, Singapore, and the nearby Central Catchment Nature Reserve after the predawn rain today, 16 June 2024 yielded this beauty: a Fairy Lynx Spider, genus Hamadruas. Needed to zoom in with the camera to appreciate its colours.
A passer-by asked for a look and was also wowed by it. Good to be able to spread an appreciation of spiders. 🙂
A Bark Spider, Caerostris sumatrana, spotted on the railing at Lornie Nature Corridor, Singapore, on 12 May 2024. A tiny but 'cool' looking spider. From a distance, it looked like a piece of poop. 🙂
so I found this tiny running crab spider with 4 legs in the park the other day and I took it home to keep until it molts them back, but it's so small it can't even have fruit flies, and seems intimidated by even the smallest of midges
so here I am, freezing some fruit flies to death (or at least temporary-enough unconsciousness), with a mortar and pestle and sugar syrup standing by, to make the world's grossest concoction
#BREAKING: a few days after eating a second fruit fly (a very large meal), the once 4-legged, then 7-legged running crab spider molted again and is now back to 8 legs!!! (You can't really see it in the photos but it's there, just small and pale.)
I'll give it a couple days to harden up and eat another fly, then I'll take it back to the park and release it where I found it.
Final update: the once-four-legged running crab spider has been released, exactly where I found it, after another fruit fly meal and a nearly successful escape attempt.
It definitely only has 7 legs, so maybe I was just seeing things the other day? I couldn't get a great look at it.
Anyway, upon release it immediately caught a bug and began racing around, so I think it will be fine.
Fantastic spidering today in High Park. Lots of jumping spiders!
The flea jumpers (Naphrys pulex) were out in force.
2 & 3. The other day down by the lake I saw a small, flattened jumper that I thought at the time was Tutelina harti but it turned out to be a totally new-to-me genus, Admestina! And today I found a pine tree stump that was just covered with them—mostly tiny spiderlings but also some slightly larger ones.
On the same stump I also saw two Attidops youngi (sadly, only got photos of one), a handsome species I've seen only once before and has only a handful of observations on #iNaturalist! https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations/207442822 :inaturalist:
Otherwise lovely walk along the lake today spoiled by (increasingly personal and vaguely threatening) anti-trans stickers, I think it's one person that's leaving them. I would say TERF from the rhetoric but there's so much crossover between them and fascists nowadays that it's not a safe assumption; could be garden-variety right wing. So, anyway, as well as looking out for spiders I was tearing off stickers.
I had A Moment with this (unidentified) tiny adorable silvery-gold and sort of sparkly dark red jumping spider. It was too intimidated to take a midge from me (still pretty large prey for it!) but it did get curious and climb all over my hand.
Was…severely emotionally exhausted the rest of the day and ended up sleeping through most of it.